Equality Labs: Getting to Know their Work in Caste Equity and Digital Security for Human Rights Defenders
The Community Series features stories of the people and projects behind the digital rights community.
Equality Labs is a Dalit feminist-led organization, challenging caste, gender roles, and historical violence online and offline. They provide practical tools for South Asian and marginalized communities to make new interventions in longstanding systems of oppression and advocate for themselves.
We talked with Sarita Sagar, deputy director of Equality Labs, to learn more about how the organization started, how the oppressive caste system abuses several communities, and the organization’s training and work in the digital era, which includes even challenging large corporations.
How Equality Labs Started
As Sarita explains, Equality Labs’ genesis was the campaign of #DalitWomenFight Tour in 2015, led by “Dalit women and Dalit queer people who broke the silence on caste and sexual violence.” They traveled across the USA and South Asia to create and collaborate with international Dalit women activists and survivors from Black, Indigenous, Latin, femme and queer communities. It also featured a 30-event,10-city solidarity art tour.
This was historic because caste was rarely spoken about for numerous reasons. For western people, the complex system is difficult to understand. For Dalits, revealing this information about themselves opens them up to abuse and violence, even in places like the USA and Europe. In fact, caste discrimination is a major problem in Silicon Valley.
It was during that tour they realized that they needed to create a “political home for South Asian minorities, especially in the face of rising authoritarianism, like the belief that India should be for dominant caste Hindus, marginalizing women, caste-oppressed, and Muslim communities.” - Sarita says.
What is Caste? And the Increased Violence throughout the World its Bringing
Before we explain Equality Labs, we must first explain caste - one of the oldest forms of discrimination, affecting more than 1 billion people across the world. It consists of graded levels of alleged purity, and places people within a certain hierarchy—leaving those in the lowest tier, subject to abuse, attacks, and systemic social exclusion. While caste systems are primarily associated with South Asia, similar structures exist in other regions such as South America, Asia, and Africa, as well as in the community diaspora of these groups.
Dalit describes historically marginalized groups in Hindu caste society. The term “Dalit” was used by Indian social activist and anti-caste social reformer, Jyotirao Phule, for the outcasts and “untouchables” who were oppressed in the Hindu society.
The deputy director of Equality Labs explains that “Dalits are some of the most systematically marginalized, subjugated, and abused people in the world, and within that paradigm, Dalit women are among the most oppressed as they exist at the intersection of gender, caste, and class.”
In addition, following the pandemic, Dalits have seen a significant increase in physical violence throughout the world, which can only be described as a genocide, as this has translated to more murders and systematic oppression.
Caste in The Digital Era and Big Corporations Cases
Sarita recalls that initially, the Internet was a space where they finally found a place to express themselves and democratize their voices. However, Dalit women quickly became subject to online abuse, such as disinformation, cyberattacks, and doxing (check out Equality Labs Anti-doxing guide for BIPOC activists here).
Over time, the Internet and the technology world started to reproduce the caste system too, including in the US where nearly 5.7 million South Asian Americans are affected. Concrete examples of how caste discrimination shows up in the USA, and especially in the tech sector:
In 2020, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a landmark suit against Cisco and two of its ex engineering managers, both upper-caste Indians, for discriminating against a Dalit engineer. Not surprisingly, various high-profile tech CEOs and board members are part of the highest caste (Brahmins).
That same year a group of 30 female Indian engineers who are members of the Dalit caste and work for Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco and other tech companies stated they have faced caste bias inside tech companies in the USA. The story was covered by the Washington Post and other news outlets.
In 2022, Equality Labs was invited by Google News to give a talk about caste-based discrimination in newsrooms for an internal event. It was canceled because some employees protested saying it was “anti-Hindu”.
Sarita says: “There is a lot of disinformation around the advocacy that we do because bad actors often label us as being ‘anti Hindu’, or ‘anti India’, or even ‘terrorists’ just for talking about this. Our leaders have been under attack and physical threat.”
Working Towards Caste Equity
Equality Labs has worked alongside politicians, legal experts, and advocacy organizations to add caste as a protected category in non-discrimination policies. They also offer consultations on caste competency to help organizations across the world advance caste equity.
First-of-its-Kind Unlearning Caste Supremacy Workshop
In 2019, Equality Labs also launched the first-of-its-kind workshop “Unlearning Caste Supremacy”, which trains individuals and organizations across corporate and nonprofit sectors. It covers the history and legacy of the oppressive system, while providing resources and tools to help participants shape their own thinking and unlearning around caste supremacy. Now a core part of their service offerings, it can be offered in person or virtually.
Addressing the Fatigue in the Face of Historic Violence through Well-being Services
Caste also has psychosocial impacts. Sarita explains that their movements across the globe have undergone unprecedented confluence of the pandemic, political violence, safety and security threats, genocide and war, and disinvestment in care and life, which has led to a state of collective fatigue.
“India is one of the biggest markets for tech companies, and there are not a lot of regulations about how people’s online activity is protected. We have seen Dalit activists expressing some opinions online, being incarcerated, which is very dangerous. People also have started to self-censor”, she adds.
Equality Labs is building community frameworks to face growing burnout and integrating healing justice into their movement work.
As Sarita shares, “we envision healing justice as a community-led response to interrupt, transform, and intervene individual and collective trauma to sustain our well-being as Dalit peoples. For instance, we are building one of the first South Asian and Dalit feminist-led somatic frameworks to bring embodiment to our community during a time of genocide. Equality Labs has been intentional in terms of incorporating a trauma-informed lens to everything we do, from training staff on somatics to building models for trauma-informed digital security.”
They also provide Digital Security Trainings, Consultations, Audit and Technical Support. You can contact them for more information about these services here. In addition, you can donate to their organization here.